Why Are Cities So Left-Wing?

Friends —

Here’s something a lot of people find hard to believe about my time at Fox News. Many of the people we hired leaned left.

If you believe the stereotypes, that should blow your mind. But it actually makes a lot of sense. FNC was headquartered in Manhattan, and most people who live there tend to be liberals. Those were the people who applied for the jobs.

But why?

When I started researching this week’s video — about why cities vote so differently from rural areas — I found out that the divide we all treat as permanent and obvious is actually new. As in, it happened in my lifetime … within a single generation. And I genuinely hadn’t understood everything surrounding it until I dug into the data.

In the 1940s and 50s, urban and rural voters moved almost in lockstep. Republicans used to run half of the 12 largest American cities as recently as the year 2000. And rural America? In the late 1800s, the most radical left-wing political energy in the country was coming out of the countryside, with farmers demanding the government take on the banks and railroads.

That framing feels bizarre today.

I’ll be honest — this is a little less edgy than my usual videos. But if you want to actually understand what’s happening in American politics — not just who’s winning or losing, but why the map looks the way it does — this is the foundation.

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I got into the Great Migration, the economic gut-punch of the 1990s, and the self-reinforcing mechanisms that keep the two sides from ever really talking to each other. Some of it I expected. A lot of it surprised me.

Hope you find it worth your time. You can click the button above or right here to view it. Have a great day!

— Ken

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